Hi Battleship Russ,

First you have been badly misinformed about the 50 destroyers. We didn’t “ditch” them so we could send new construction down the ways. There wasn’t going to be any new construction of any magnitude anytime soon.

The American public didn’t understand the danger Hitler represented to America and the rest of the free world and refused to get involved in any European war and Congress backed them up. After all we are a democracy even when the majority is wrong.

Roosevelt had his hands tied as to how he could help the Brits but he knew it was in our best interest to do so. Hitler had to be stopped and the Brits were our friends and allies and they were doing the fighting but needed help right now.

Those destroyers were sorely needed by the Brits. Their military funding had been slashed just like ours after WWI and now they were in a shooting war without all the resources they needed to win. With congress not allowing us to join in, the only thing to do was to help the Brits as best we could.

Additionally the Brits paid dearly for most of what they got from us during the war. At first our policy was strictly cash & carry. Lend-Lease came about after they started to run low on cash. And in return for the 50 destroyers we were granted long-term leases to establish military bases on British possessions strategically located off the western hemisphere. The right to construct and maintain naval and air bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua, St. Lucia, Trinidad and British Guiana for a period of 99 years was also ceded to the United States. This was actually a good deal for both sides. The Brits didn’t have to put down cash that was in short supply and we ended up using the bases to prosecute the war when we were fully in it with the Brits to their advantage and to ours. Putting those destroyers to work wasn’t cheap for them but it was faster and cheaper than building them from scratch and they didn’t have the time or the resources to do that either.

Considering our political situation at home those destroyers were the only way we could help at the time. And make no mistake when the U-boats got to our shores the excuse Admiral King used for refusing to implement the convoy system was that he didn’t have the escorts to do it. Having those 50 destroyers on hand would have saved countless merchant seamen’s lives.

They were obsolete as destroyers go but we were still operating Wickes and Clemson class destroyers just like most of the 50 lend-lease destroyers (3 Caldwell class, 26 Wickes class and 21 Clemson class) and we operated some of them all through WWII.

The Clemson class USS REUBEN JAMES was the first United States Navy ship sunk by hostile action in the European theater of World War II. She was sunk in October 1941. A year after the 50 destroyers went to the Brits.

The USS BUCHANAN named after the founder of the U.S. Naval Academy, Franklin Buchanan (renamed HMS CAMPBELTOWN by the Brits) came out of mothballs on 30 September 1939, at which time she was refitted for action with Division 65, Destroyer Squadron 32, Atlantic Squadron. She operated with the Neutrality Patrol and the Antilles Detachment from December 1939 until 22 February 1940. She was then assigned to patrol the Gulf of Mexico, operating out of Galveston, Texas, and later off Key West and around the Florida Keys. She arrived at the Boston Navy Yard on 2 September and then proceeded to Halifax where on 9 September she was decommissioned, and transferred to the United Kingdom as one of the 50 destroyers. She arrived at Devenport, England on 29 September 1940. She was attached to the 7th Escort Group in the Western Approaches Command. On 8 January, 1941 she went on temporary service with the Royal Dutch Navy until 12 September, 1941 when she reverted to the British Royal Navy.

During the next 6 months of convoy duty, she fought off two air attacks, engaged two U-boats, and picked up survivors from the Norwegian motor tanker VINGA that had been hit by the Luftwaffe.

Hurriedly built under the pressure of wartime necessity, the 50 old destroyers generally lacked modern equipment and armament and were far from being mechanically dependable though some were in better shape than others. The first thing the Brits had to do when they got them was to put them into shape and that took some time.

They were all of the four-stacker flush-deck type typical of the type used during WWI. Armament consisted of four 4-inch deck guns and one or two 3-inch anti-aircraft guns, plus twelve 21 inch torpedo tubes. Their top speed was 30 to 35 knots.

They needed Asdic for escort duty so the Brits had to add it along with fixing a lot of other things but they didn’t have to be brought up completely to modern destroyer standards just for escort duty.

Convoy escorts at that time were responsible for protecting the convoy, not sinking U-boats. Getting the convoy through was absolutely vital to the war effort. Sinking U-boats would have to wait until they had the resources to do both.

When a U-boat was detected the tactic was to force the U-boat to submerge long enough for the convoy to escape. If they sank it in the process so much the better but getting the convoy through was their mission.

A U-boat’s top underwater speed was limited to less than 8 knots and then only for a very short time before they had to surface & recharge their batteries and they certainly didn’t want to do that if they thought the escort was still there. A U-boat was a poor gun platform and in general was not up to winning a gunfight with a warship. That left trying to torpedo a shallow draft (compared to a merchant ship) warship that could maneuver at 30+ knots while shooting at the U-boat. A single hole in a U-boat’s pressure hull rendered it unable to dive and was essentially the kiss of death for it.

All-in-all these old destroyers were to do a commendable job in their primary duty as convoy escorts using these tactics. Additionally they were used as placeholders performing tasks that freed up the Brit’s more capable warships to do more important tasks. Several were sunk by the Germans. One was sunk in the futile defense of Singapore. One (HMS CAMPBELTOWN) was used in the famous raid on St. Nazaire. The target was lock gate of the Forme Ecluse (also known as the Normandie Dry Dock). It needed to be destroyed to keep TRIPITZ from using it. The solution was to fill CAMPBELTOWN with more than 4 tons of explosive in a metal tank sitting over the fuel compartments and use her to ram the lock gate then detonate her explosives with a timing mechanism destroying the lock gate in concert with a commando raid. It worked. The explosion tore the caisson off its rollers and drove CAMPBELTOWN, minus her bow, half the length of the dry dock and the dry dock was destroyed.

By the beginning of 1944 the toll of merchant ship sinkings was being reduced and the U-boat threat was being brought under control. The need for these old destroyers, now becoming prone to malfunctions and breakdowns, diminished as newer, faster, and more modern vessels began joining the allied fleets.

During 1944 the Brits turned nine of the 50 destroyers over to the Russians to be manned by Russian crews to protect convoys on the Murmansk run.

As the war progressed and they wore themselves out they were replaced by more capable new construction and they were decommissioned and scrapped. Within two years following the end of the war all of them under British command had been scrapped. The eight of the nine sent to Russia that survived the war were all scrapped by 1952.

Regards,

Ken Dunn